Carl Thompson flew to Singapore with $3,000, shared a pullout bed with his co-founder in a room so small he could touch the wall sitting up, and cold-called New York at 2am because that's when the market was awake. That was the start of TradeGecko.

He left the company two and a half years in, halfway through his vesting schedule, because he needed to come home for his relationships and his health. He split his role into five people on the way out. A few years later, Cam checked his spam folder and found an email from Intuit saying they wanted to buy the business. The acquisition closed at $100 million US.

Carl has ADHD, has been cycling in and out of burnout for 20 years, and now runs SortMe, a money management platform built around the uncomfortable fact that 60% of NZ households can't cover a $1,500 bill without borrowing. His clients aren't struggling. They earn $150K to $500K a year and spend every dollar of it.

We get into:

• Why he walked away from millions in unvested equity and whether he regrets it
• The dopamine science behind ADHD and why he thinks it's a competitive advantage for founders
• How a spam folder email became a $100M acquisition
• What lifestyle creep actually looks like at high income levels
• What he did with the exit money the day it landed

If you're building something and wondering what it looks like to choose the life over the money and keep building anyway, this one's worth your time.

Lisa King had a goal from the very first day of Eat My Lunch: the business would be a success the day it became unnecessary.

She built it in 2015 to solve a problem she couldn't stop thinking about, kids going hungry at school in a country of abundance. By week 12 she was making 2,000 lunches a day out of her own kitchen. At peak, nearly 5,000, with police officers, politicians, and grannies in their sixties all buttering bread before sunrise. Then the government launched its own school lunch program, and Lisa did something most founders never do. She closed the business on purpose.

Before that happened, a media story accused her of personally profiting off hungry kids, at a time when she was being paid less than she'd ever earned. She had to show a reporter her payslip to prove it. We talk through what that period actually felt like, what New Zealand's tall poppy syndrome did to her willingness to talk to press afterward, and the identity crisis of letting go of a business that had defined her for five years.

We get into:

• How Eat My Lunch scaled from 50 to nearly 5,000 lunches a day
• The media smear and what it actually cost her personally
• Why she built the business to make itself redundant from day one
• What closing your first business does to your sense of who you are

If you're building something with real purpose behind it, or wondering what it takes to walk away from your own success on your own terms, this one's worth your time.

Most founders won't give up 80% of their business. The ones who did walked away with more than if they'd kept 100%.

Murray Schnuriger made the jump from 20 years advising founders on exits to actually owning the risk at 5V Capital, a mid-market PE fund across Australia and New Zealand. Toby King has spent his career at Cameron Partners, one of NZ's most established M&A firms, allied with Rothschild and Company. Together they've sat on both sides of more NZ business exits than almost anyone alive.

The Education Perfect story is the one that sticks. Two brothers built an edtech platform into 50% of NZ secondary schools, hit their ceiling, and sold 80% to 5V. One went backpacking for a year. 5V brought in a new CEO, put sales teams on the ground in Australia, and tripled the business in three years. Exit to KKR. The 20% the brothers held at the end was worth more than their original 100%. That's the structure most NZ founders never think to ask about.

Murray and Toby pull no punches on what founders consistently get wrong, pricing on EBITDA when buyers price on free cash flow, waiting one more year for growth when the multiple compression wipes out the gain, and showing up to a sale process without a narrative that holds up under serious due diligence.

We get into:

Why selling 80% can leave you wealthier than holding everything

The EBITDA trap that costs NZ founders millions at the table

Why "one more year of growth" is often the most expensive decision you'll make

How PE investors actually think about your exit before they've even finished investing in you

What your business narrative needs to nail to earn a premium valuation

The succession wave hitting NZ baby boomer founders and why PE is filling the gap

If you're building something and wondering what it actually looks like to sell part of your business, back yourself for one more run, and walk away with more than you started with, this one's worth your time.